AI agents that think before they spend
Real budgets. Real Stellar payments. Visible reasoning for every decision.
Stellar · x402 · Claude AI · OpenZeppelin
AI agents are spending machines
No Spending Judgment
Agents buy everything or nothing. There’s no cost-benefit analysis.
No Budget Control
Once an agent has wallet access, there’s no policy enforcement or spending limits.
No Audit Trail
You can’t audit decisions you can’t see. Agent spending is a black box.
“$7.84 billion AI agent market. 75 million x402 transactions last month. Zero economic reasoning.”
The economic reasoning layer
PennyAgent is the brain between the agent and the wallet. Not another payment rail — the intelligence that decides when to use one.
Discover
Scan the tool registry for free and paid APIs relevant to the task.
Decide
Claude evaluates each tool: is this worth the price for this task?
Pay or Skip
Approved: x402 micropayment on Stellar in ~5s. Rejected: reasoning logged.
“The key moment: the agent choosing NOT to buy an overpriced tool. That decision is the product.”
From task to transaction in seconds
Task + Budget
Agent receives a research task with a USDC budget and spending policy.
Discover Tools
Scans the tool registry for free and paid APIs relevant to the task.
Free First
Runs all free tools to establish baseline data before spending anything.
Claude Evaluates
For each paid tool, Claude analyzes: is this worth the price for this task?
Policy Check
Policy engine verifies: within budget? under per-tool cap? on the allowlist?
Buy or Skip
Approved → x402 micropayment on Stellar in ~5s. Rejected → reasoning logged.
Real payments. Real receipts.
Every payment PennyAgent makes is a real Stellar transaction. Here are actual transactions from our testnet demo.
Agent Wallet
GBVXIZW7...WDCO4A46Receiver Wallet
GDJPEHFB...TX3DUFFJWhat's real today
Every payment and decision is real. Tool data is simulated for the demo — the economic reasoning layer is what matters.
Stellar testnet payments
Real USDC transactions via x402
x402 settlement
OpenZeppelin facilitator on Stellar testnet
Agent decision logic
Claude evaluates worth, policy engine enforces limits
Transaction receipts
Real Stellar tx hashes, verifiable on Stellar Expert
Stellar readiness tool
Live Stellar RPC — real wallet balance and network health
Premium tool data
Simulated datasets for news, sentiment, and research (clearly labeled)
Five forces converging
x402 Protocol
Coinbase + Cloudflare launched HTTP-native payments. 75M+ transactions in 30 days.
LLM Tool Calling + MCP
Claude and GPT-4 support structured function calling. MCP standardizes tool discovery — agents can find and pay for services automatically.
Stablecoin Maturity
$317B market cap. GENIUS Act passed. USDC processes $710B/month.
Enterprise Adoption
93% of IT leaders plan to deploy autonomous AI agents within 2 years.
Viable Micropayments
Sub-cent precision on Stellar. ~$0.00001 per transaction. The economics finally work.
“Very soon there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions.”
— Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
Where AI agents shop smart
For Tool Providers
- List your API with an x402 paywall
- Set pay-per-use pricing with sub-cent precision
- Get discovered by AI agents automatically
- Earn revenue with zero marketing spend
For Agent Operators
- Give agents a budget and spending rules
- Policy-enforced: caps, limits, allowlists
- Full transparency: reasoning + receipts for every decision
- Works with any AI model — Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, open source
We earn when agents spend wisely
Platform Fee
2-5% on intelligent purchases. Lower than any marketplace. We make money when agents make good decisions.
Policy Engine SaaS
FeaturedAdvanced governance, analytics, and compliance for enterprise agent fleets. $20-100/mo.
Marketplace Premium
Verified badges, featured placement, and priority discovery for tool providers.
The agent economy needs economic middleware. We're building it.
Built for testnet. Designed for mainnet.
Mainnet Ready
Switch from Stellar testnet to mainnet. Real USDC, production facilitator from OpenZeppelin.
XLM Support
Add native XLM payments alongside USDC. No trustlines needed — lower friction for agents.
Enterprise Security
Hardware wallet signing, rate limiting, on-chain spending caps via Soroban smart contracts.
Fleet Scale
Multi-agent fleet management, enterprise SSO, compliance audit logs, spending analytics.
MCP Integration
Run as an MCP server so Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI tools can discover and pay for services through PennyAgent’s policy engine.
Gasless Onboarding
Create agent wallets without XLM using Stellar’s native account sponsorship. Zero upfront cost to start transacting.
This is infrastructure, not a demo. Every component is designed for production deployment.
Production-grade technology
Reliable, battle-tested tools powering real micropayments and AI reasoning.
Be among the first
I'm a Tool Provider
I'm an Agent Operator
Register an AI Agent
No spam. We'll email you when it's your turn.
Ready to see AI spend wisely?
Built for Stellar Hacks: Agents 2026 by @mattabb2020